One
hundred years ago, the Neapolitan historian and
philosopher, Benedetto Croce,
wandered up to the hilly part of Naples, an area called
the "high Vomero", specifically to the "Due Porte"—the two
gates (entrances to caverns) to see what was left of the
premises where one of the first scientific societies in
European history had convened centuries earlier. That is,
by 1580, well before the Academy of the Lynxes or the
Royal Society of London, Giambattista Della Porta's Academia
SecretorumNaturae was
meeting to uncover the "secrets of nature". They nicknamed
themselves the Otiosi (Men of Leisure), and
in order to join you had to have contributed a new
discovery or fact in natural science. (Later in life,
Della Porta helped establish the Academy of the Lynxes,
which counted Galileo as its most illustrious member.)

In the days of Della Porta, Naples was in the
middle of the great Spanish rebuilding of the city under
viceroy Toledo, but the city
didn't even have a population of 200,000 (nevertheless,
large for the time). This part of the "high Vomero" was,
indeed, a hamlet near
Naples, known as the area of the washerwomen and of one
particularly nasty witch. When Croce visited the place, it
was still far enough outside of town to count as a
pleasant holiday retreat in the summer—a good view from
the hillside (about 1000 feet) fresh air, no traffic. He
found and described the ruins of what was left of this
One-Man Renaissance Manhattan Project. He lamented that
little remained.* Yet, there was much more than today;
traffic and the post-WW2 building plague have pretty much
done in any claim to being "bucolic". On the plus side,
the concrete apartment house that now stands over the old
inner sanctum isn't far from a stop on the new metro line. (That's
bogus, too. I've just walked it and it's still hard to get
to. The perfect place for secrecy.)
[See also: Urban Expansion of the
Vomero.]

[BUT!—later comment from June 2014— Selene Salvi of Naples
Undergroundpoints out to me that there
is considerable controversy about whether or not the
site referred to in this entry is, indeed, the meeting
place of Della Porta's Academy of the Secrets. The
assumption that the area Due Porte is somehow, itself,
related to the name Della Porta is almost certainly
wrong. There really are two entrances.
Also, there are sources from the 1700s that, while
acknowledging the widely-held view that "up here
somewhere" is where Della Porta had his Academy, no
one seems to know where it was. The name
Della Porta did not appear to be connected, even
historically, to any of the known villas. Item #2,
below, sheds some light on what else the site might have
been.]*note:
Selene also informs me that the Croce expedition to the
purported Della Porta site is recounted in Vita
di Pietro Giannone scritta da lui medesimo,
edited by Fausto Nicolini, Naples, Pierro, 1905.

In his first famous publication, Magia naturalis [Natural Magic], Della Porta
indicated what "magic" meant to him in those days: "I
think magic is nothing less than a survey of the whole
course of nature." That is the Renaissance context in
which moderns must understand the word: everything in the
universe is connected and a Renaissance Man must study—and
at least try to
know—everything. In those days, that meant writing:

Della Porta also started a private museum of
natural science, full of specimens collected during his
wide-ranging travels in Europe; it was an important
innovation and became an imitated prototype. He also
claimed to have beaten his younger contemporary, Galileo,
to the telescope. (Be that as it may, one thing is
certain: Della Porta got into Galileo-type trouble with
the watchdogs of the Roman Inquisition* for his "secret
academy". The Inquisition closed it down in 1578, and
Della Porta's works were banned from publication between
1594-98.) In his spare time (!), he published De Furtivis LiterarumNotis, a work on
cryptography, admired even in modern times.

Recent archaeology has revealed such
items within the ruins of
Della Porta's" academy of secrets" as
this fresco of the Egyptian
God, Set, and Isis (on the left)
nursing the infant Horus.
photo: Napoli Underground (NUg)
(see item 4, below)

Giambattista Della Porta
was born in the village of Vico Equense on the Sorrentine
peninsula and was well educated at home by his father and
private tutors. His father was in the service of Holy
Roman Emperor, Charles V. From all accounts, Giambattista
was a prodigy; he may have written the first four books of
Natural Magic when he was 15 years old. The entire
work was virtually a compendium of science since the time
of the ancients down through Della Porta's own day; it
covered geology, cosmology, plant products, medicines,
poisons, distillation, the magnet and its properties,
gunpowders, and ciphers. It also covered things such as
demonology, astrology, occult philosophy, women's
cosmetics, and transmutation of metals, none of which are
considered particularly scientific today, but in the late
1500s everything was fair game. (Indeed, a glorious age!)
In short, whatever you wanted to know, Della Porta had
written about it or was in the process of doing so. It was
an immediate best seller and was translated almost
immediately from the original Latin into Italian, French
and German; an English translation was published in the
1650s. Even in Latin, however, the work was accessible to
all European scholars when it was written.

Della Porta lived in a strange time—the tail-end of
the age of "pre-science". To put things in perspective,
young Giambattista's father remembered (!) Leonardo Da Vinci. Della
Porta worked a generation before Galileo and Bacon (both
inspired by Della Porta's tenacious will to investigate
nature), a half century before Kepler and Descartes, and a
full century before Newton. It was an age that still clung
to the Renaissance vision that one good person with drive,
time, and a very large brain could learn everything there
was to know. He mixed valid work in optics and botany (two
of many examples) with nonsense about fortune-telling and
the "philosophers' stone". He also soft-pedaled his brash
curiosity when the Inquisition told him to. But even
Galileo did that.

Della Porta joined the Jesuit order towards the end
of his life. That disqualifies him, in the minds on many,
as being counted as an early scientific rebel like
Galileo. And maybe he wasn't. Maybe he was just a man who
wanted to "survey the whole course of nature". That has to
count for something. He was interred in the family tomb
within the church of San Lorenzo
in Naples.

[Significant
and recent archaeology on the premises of the Academia SecretorumNaturae has been done
by the organization, Naples Underground. See
this link.]

[Dec. 2009 update: Larry Ray, who writes English-language
material for Naples Underground, has written and posted an
article on the "Academy of the Secrets" at this link.]

update
May 2014:Fulvio Salvi of Napoli
Underground (NUg— the
second link directly above) has suggested
an alternative to the traditional view that the site in
Naples was Della Porta's academy. Below is my
translation of his article that appears on the NUg
website. Used here by kind concession.

Academy of the Secrets—or
“simply” a Garden?

by Fulvio Salvi

photo courtesy of
NUg

About 25 years ago two
geologist friends and I were hunting around on the slopes
of the street named Due Porte all'Arenella in an attempt
to pinpoint the locations of some caverns that historical
sources place in that area. I came across a small grotto
that at first left me perplexed. There were three spaces
connected by tunnels and corridors; on their surfaces you
could still see frescoed plaster, reconstructed columns,
semi-cylindrical niches and traces of engraved plaques.

It had all been altered in some way. You could still make
out part of the fresco representing three subjects: a
woman seated on a bench holding a child in her lap, and a
human figure with a damaged face holding out a tray of
offerings to her (photo in the main entry, directly above
this one). Very probably the artist had intended to depict
in Egyptian fashion the goddess Isis nursing Horus. In the
same space (a corridor about ten meters long) on the side
walls, the plaster had been frescoed to simulate opus reticulatum [a
Roman reticulated pattern of diamond-shaped bricks]; there
were also four or five semi-cylindrical niches that were
empty but led us to believe that they had once held
statuary or similar. At the end of this passageway was a
single wooden door that led to the outside. We later
discovered that this was the bottom entrance to the
grotto.

The next chamber (the first room) was jammed with building
materials; the walls were covered with panels that hid the
surface of the wall in back. In any event, you could see a
circular column in the room inscribed with an elongated
numeral 8 like a kind of infinity symbol except that it
was vertical. A low tunnel led from this room into a
second space. The entrance to the tunnel had also been
shaped to resemble a large numeral 8.

After a couple of meters the tunnel came out in the second
room; the walls still had traces of frescoed plaster but
the images were so degraded that you couldn't make out
what they were meant to be. In this space there were two
fake columns (made of brick and plaster); one was
circular, the other was square. There was a horizontal
niche on one wall that originally must have been sealed by
a plaque, traces of which were still visible. The back
wall was of brick and irregular-shaped tufa blocks; a
series of openings (a door at the bottom and some spaces
for oil lamps higher up) gave the impression that it was
meant to represent a face or perhaps a skull (photo,
above. Courtesy of NUg). This last wall separated this
space from a small parking space behind; it was of recent
manufacture and belonged to the building on the surface
above. Yet another short passage led to a third room
almost totally filled with dumped earth, probably hauled
in from a well on the surface. There was a hole high up on
on the side of the second room that led to a narrow and
steep stairway made of brick that, in turn, led to a
garden on the surface. It had been from these stairs and
then by lowering ourselves from the hole in the wall that
we first gained entrance to this underground chamber.

Obviously, we were amazed at first glance by all of this.
We had explored hundreds of spaces beneath Naples, but
this was the first time that we had found something like
this! We made sketches and took some photos of the grotto.
With these in hand we tried to attract the interest of the
Superintendency of Naples, but to no avail. Given the
difficult access (we had got in only by lowering ourselves
through a hole in the wall) and the fact that this
particular space really wasn't part of our original
research plans, we put it off for another few years.

Another decade passed and I found myself talking with
engineer Clemente Esposito (a veteran of Neapolitan
speleology) about how the whole thing had sort of gone
back into oblivion. Thanks to his insistence and that of
my daughter, Selene, I contacted the owner of the property
to get permission to enter the premises once again. We
reached an agreement. Thus, years later we went back into
the grotto, this time by the more comfortable lower
entrance. Everything was as it was when we had seen it for
the first time. We took more photos and made a video. But
the question remained: What could this space have been
that no one seemed to know anything about and only
old-timers in the area still knew as the teatrino (little
theater)?

The
Dessau-Wörlitz Garden Kingdom in Germany
photo: Doris Antony

Esposito was of the
opinion that the cavern might have been the laboratories
of Giambattista Della Porta, a secret place where meetings
of his famous Academy of the Secrets were held. The
residential quarters that surrounded the grotto must have
been the summer homes of the Della Porta family.

But was it really? Or was it rather nothing more than a
sophisticated and fascinating garden structure, part of
the property of the ancient casale [a large
country estate] that we find on the Duke of Noja map,
perhaps torn down in order to make room for more modern
cement buildings?

In the 1700s and 1800s a number of aristocratic villas and
royal residences in Naples took up the fashion of building
those famous “English landcape gardens” that had so much
success elsewhere in Europe. I am thinking, among the many
examples, of the Capodimonte
Wood with its fake dovecotes near the so-called
Grottoes of Maria Cristina di Savoia, and of the
fake ruins within the grounds of the Villa Floridiana, or the
gardens of the Caserta Palace,
or the villa Heigelin (known as the “English villa”),
where the gardens, rich with grottoes, ruins and statuary,
contained a true Masonic path laden with esoteric symbols.
The rest of Italy had its own examples. Among the many,
there was the hypogeum [underground chamber] of villa
Francescati in Verona, the vaulted entrance of which is so
similar to the one at Arenella. Further, there is the
curious structure of the Dessau-Wörlitz Gartenreich
(Garden Kingdom) in Germany (photo above, right),
considered the first English park built in continental
Europe in the 1700s. It holds a “stone island” and next to
that a reconstruction of William
Hamilton's villa at Posillipo in Naples. The stones
were meant to simulate the pyrotechnical results of a
fanciful eruption of Vesuvius! Here, too, there is a vault
with wide-open eyes and mouth, similar to the Neapolitan
hypogeum... did Naples take the idea from Germany...or
perhaps the other way round?

[translator's note:It certainly
was the other way round. Wörlitz Lake in the Garden
Kingdom (photo, above), near Magdeburg in Germany,
features Europe’s only artificial volcano. When Leopold
III (1740-1817) of Anhalt-Dessau went on a grand tour of
Europe in the 1760s, he visited Naples and saw a
smouldering Mount Vesuvius. Twenty-two years later, he
set about building a bit of Naples in Germany. The inner
brick building is five stories high and covered with
local boulders. At the top, a hollow cone was made and
contained a high chamber, complete with three fireplaces
and a roof with an artificial crater that could be
filled with water. He then constructed a lake around the
volcano. Artificial eruptions were a regular garden
feature; that feature has been revived in recent years.]

update June 2014

(3)

It helps to have read
parts 1 & 2, above.
This is not part of the above translation. This one is
all my fault— Jeff Matthews

Further
considerations

Why was that wall made to
resemble a face (and possibly a skull)? (entry #2,
above - top photo)

An ogre in the Park
Of Monsters in Bomarz
in the region of Viterbo, north of Rome.

For those who like fancy (or even
fanciful!) interpretation, here are a few ideas. My first
stray thought was that it was meant to be a skull and that
there was a connection with the
memento mori (remember that you must die), the
omnipresent skull found in so many places in Roman
Catholic countries to remind you not to get too full of
yourself, but remain humble and good. I still like that
idea a bit, but I am indebted to Selene Salvi, researcher,
artist and member of Napoli Underground for reminding me
of all the other possibilities. She also points out
to me(as I note in entry #1, above, that there is
considerable controversy over whether or not the site in
question was ever really the fabled meeting place of Della
Porta's Academy of the Secrets. Another possibility is
discussed in #2, above. Whatever it was...
...The face/skull might be an ogre in the sense of the
Latin Orcus, that is, a personification of hell,
the underworld. The cavern itself might be a symbol of the
underworld, such as in The Aeneid or The
Divine Comedy, where both Aeneas and Dante descend
to the nether realm in order to gain the rebirth that
comes with knowledge. You must die in order to be reborn.
The face/skull, itself, is Orcus, later transformed in
folklore and myth into the man-like monster that devours
human beings. Such creatures are common in fairy tales
throughout the world, including “The Three Fairies” in The
Tale of Tales, also known as The Pentamaron
by Neapolitan Giambattista Basile;
indeed, his fairy tales predate better-known collections
in Europe and helped spread the ogre figure in popular
legend. I am not aware of any connection between Basile
and Della Porta, although they were contemporaries in
Naples. But you never know! Perhaps,

Also,
In ancient times, volcanoes were thought to be entrances
to the underworld, which may explain the presence in the
Dessau-Wörliz park of Mt. Vesuvius (entry#2, above, bottom
photo) shaped with the face/skull as the entrance to the
volcano and death, yes, but really to eventual rebirth and
knowledge. Also, if you wish to expand your search
parameters, or as scholars say, "Really go nuts with this,
"you may find that Golgotha, the hill upon which Christ
was crucified was named Golgotha, meaning "place
of the skull." Death and Resurrection.

My erudite informant
also says she wonders if the face/skull might have
something to do with La Bocca della Verità (the
Mouth of Truth), a marble image of a man-like face at the
church of Santa Maria in Cosmedin in Rome. The
sculpture is probably part of a first-century ancient
Roman fountain thought to represent the ancient god of the
river Tiber. The salient bit of myth here, however, is the
legend that says if you tell a lie with your hand in the
mouth of the sculpture, it will bite your hand off! In
popular culture, that bit of legend was spread around the
world in the 1953 film, Roman Holiday. Gregory
Peck puts his hand in the mouth of the stone figure
(photo, above, left) and whispers sweet nothings to Audrey
Hepburn and... all of a sudden!... (No, I
don't remember, and I wouldn't want to spoil it for you!)
Of further popular note, "The Ghost Who Walks"—yes, none other than the comic strip
adventure hero, The Phantom, has a really neat
house—the Skull Cave! Yes, when Superman (1938) was still
sucking mother's milk on Krypton and before Batman and his
cave (1939) there was the Phantom (image, right). (He is
not the first Masked Avenger. There are precedents such as
The Scarlet Pimpernel, Zorro and the Lone
Ranger, all of whom wore masks, yes, but the Phantom
was the first to sport that skin-tight body suit. I rest
my case.) Creator Lee Falk, who started the Phantom series
in 1936, died in 1999, so I can't ask him where he got the
idea of the Skull Cave. If you know, please tell me, but I
don't want to hear that the Phantom lives in a pumpkin.update
- July 11, 2016

Neapolitan artist Selene Salvi has sent me this photo
related to numbers 1 and 2 (above): respectively, Della
Porta's use of Egyptian motifs and "Academy of the Secrets
— or
simply a garden?" A MUCH larger image plus details are here.